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sasster · 4 months ago

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Civil Matters

I guess that’s that then, huh? [doc] —

Very few trolls can attest to having seen The Restorer outside of the grounds that his safe haven of a city occupies in the many hundreds of sweeps since the passing of his predecessor. If asked after it, he might say there is simply no reason to exert any power over the remainder of his region; they have always more or less followed the norms of the area immediate to the church and its surroundings. Even fewer trolls have seen him move with any more passion than his typically relaxed gait, if his very recent worrying after his son went uncounted.

All of this nonsense feels to him as though it somehow started seconds ago and has been going on for many many sweeps at the same time. Whenever it started, he would like to see it end now, a thought that might have lent itself to why he moves with such swiftness behind enemy lines.

When he enters the Church of the Divine Dreamer, the yellow blooded priest falls short mid-sentence. His wings twitch, and Ailzea supposes that he is in search of the right thing to say in the face of their territory’s overseeing purple blood deciding on a surprise visit. Behind the frozen priest, the Goddess he preaches in the name of tilts her head at the sight of the newcomer.

Then she smiles.

The gathered congregants' heads turn to catch sight of the disruption.

“Father Restorer! Will you be joining us for service this evening?” She asks brightly as her brother bristles.

Ailzea nods his head. “Please forgive my tardiness. It is quite a bit out of the way from my own home.” He says and then takes a seat at the back.

Promptly, the attention of the congregation returns to the priest at the pulpit, whose visible eye darts wildly between them and someone unseen at the other end of it.

The godling closes her eyes and settles back in, while her brother clears his throat, taking a moment to recalibrate his thinking and relocate his center. He begins to move again, there is something familiar about the way he carries himself that fills the Restorer’s mind with a weight that he is uncomfortable with carrying.

Cylion suddenly smiles.

“Yes, thank you for joining us, Father Roatus! It is truly an honor to have you.” Clearly not one to let an opportunity slip through his claws, the yellow blood places those same hands down onto the lectern with gusto, and sweeps his gaze over the crowd in a manner that suggests hunger. He practically laps up their attention. “In times of uncertainty, even other religious leaders make the time to visit our Dreamer.” A quiet murmuring starts to spread among the congregation, from what Ailzea listens in on there is a range of reaction in the small gathering that ranges from doubt to astonishment. To him it seems that Cylion really grew into the perfect little priest that Ailzea’s own predecessor looked for within him. At least someone came to learn from the brute. A shame about everyone catching strays as a result of that learning.

“The dream world that you know of is a bridge between the divine and mortal worlds,” he continues, explaining what must be an introduction to the religion for new comers. There is a nervous edge to his movement as he gestures to the furnishings and decorations that resemble or allude to Nymira within the chamber. “And our Dreamer is a gift from the Divine, sent here to show us and teach in its name the ways we can become closer to it…”

Behind him the Goddess sits motionless, save for the swaying of her tail fanned out behind her. What a massive undertaking for such a young troll. The pair of them must be under tremendous stress. Trollkind was never meant for the burdens of godhood, but damn do they keep trying.

Cylion continues to ramble on in his indoctrination and Ailzea finds himself drawn to the artwork of the young Goddess, allowing the light blues and dreamlike qualities of the pieces pull him away from the sermon. It is a wonder she doesn’t feel completely smothered with all of this attention, that the only pressure she claims to feel presently is the way her brother has started to behave.

He will not get a better understanding of the situation until the three of them sit down for a real conversation. Four if Favion chooses civility. Ailzea is unsure that it’s something he is capable of these days, however. A conversation to have with Weaver when this has all ended.

There is a sudden, almost flighty, tap on his shoulder that serves as a welcome interruption from the thought of his old friend’s descent into madness, and he turns to give his full attention to that disruption. He trades the view of beautiful artwork, depicting scenes of the whimsical and fantastical, for an uneasy looking troll with a bowl cut. Arkiro would find that juxtaposition hilarious.

“Can you come with me?” The disruption mumbles under the priest's lecture, and Ailzea can’t tell if those pupil-less eyes are on him or the speaker at the far front.

He casts a look to the Dreamer before he responds. Nymira gives him an encouraging smile. Somehow, despite the circumstances, she still believes her brothers operate on goodwill. He nods and stands to follow the troll that stands in front of him.

They walk until they reach a part of the compound that seems a bit more residential, their slice of land surely impressive and no doubt a result of Favion’s masterful use of manipulation tactics when he’s in his best mind.

“Cylion will speak to you in here,” the troll with the bowl cut says as he leads him into a dining area flanked by two closed bedroom doors. It is all he’s said the entire trip. “In the name of privacy.” He explains.

“I understand. Thank you.”

Then his escort moves to exit the way they entered, but Ailzea speaks again before he can get very far. “Will the elder Lefera be joining us as well?

He freezes in the doorway and seems to wince or shudder at the thought.

“Yeah, I’ll,” a pause. “I’ll check on that for you.”

A curious response, but not one the Restorer can fault him for.

Favion is not a troll to be invoked lightly.

Some time passes before the young priest finds his way to the room that Ailzea waits for him in. In that time, Ailzea has found himself regretting not bringing something with which to keep his hands and mind busy. Though he dares not craft under that savage of a man’s roof. The ghost of a horrible memory looms somewhere in the back of his mind. He sighs it away.

Cylion enters the room briskly, already having tugged the collar out from his shirt, the sunflower from his eye, holding each in his hand as he pulls the rest of his ceremonial garb up over his head to reveal a tanktop underneath. The ceremonial clothes seems to Ailzea to hide much of the bulk of the yellow blood’s wings, but his under shirt allows him the freedom to stretch them out. Which he does.

He discards his accessories on a counter on his way to where the Restorer sits. Finally, he gives him his full attention.

The eye contact fills Ailzea’s head with an uncomfortably pregnant fog.

“Father will not be joining us.” He asserts.

It must be that he is over the original shock of the Restorer’s presence enough for the coolness of his facade to have taken root again. Something tells him that it was in the name of that facade that he was sent away in the middle of the sermon.

“I am afraid my visit largely concerns your father and his recent behavior, regarding my children and otherwise. I would like him to be in attendance.”

Cylion’s nose nearly scrunches, almost twisting his face up at the mention of children, but he stops himself partway through. Ailzea imagines the protest of Marrie as a child dying on the tongue he sucks against his teeth.

Cool neutrality returns to his face. “We are deeply sorry for that–”

“Favion will join us. Nymira as well.” There is a level of force alien to even Ailzea that the words leave his mouth with. “Please.” He amends.

The younger priest’s mouth clamps shut with an audible clacking of his teeth, clearly unused to his authority being challenged. “Father is unwell. And Nymira must rest.”

“Cylion. I am no longer asking.”

Something familiar that isn’t forcibly repressed in the Restorer’s mind bubbles behind Cylion’s eye and just below the surface of his features. Ailzea’d seen that look long ago, hundreds of times, just before Favion would do something reprehensible. The expression passes over the younger Lefera like a ghost.

At least he has some level of self control.

“Of course.” He grits, takes a moment to step away to give the instruction to Bowl Cut at the door, and returns to sit near the Grand High Blood finally tossing his weight around. “It would be easier with me.”

“I am not looking for easy. I am looking for finished.”

Cylion shakes his head and averts his gaze to his own perfectly manicured nails, tongue sucking against his teeth again. “You’re as stubborn as Archie.”

–

Nymira arrives first, also changed into clothing designed more in the name of comfort than presentation. She practically floats ahead of Bowl Cut as they enter.

The two yellow bloods exchange an indecipherable look as the godling crosses all the way to the side of the table the Restorer sits at.

“I’m so happy you made it, Father Restorer!” Her enthusiasm as palpable as one brother's dread and the other’s anger. “Did you enjoy the service?”

“I did, thank you for having me.” He looks at the brothers for a brief moment and then returns his attention to her. “I have been thinking about our conversation, my child. How does some time away from home sound to you?”

The silence that wraps itself around the room as the question leaves his mouth is as thick and impenetrable as the block that prevents Ailzea from properly focusing on the winged yellow blood.

“She can’t just–”

“I will not force you,” Ailzea continues once Cylion’s bewildered, close to the tipping point, voice pierces through the blanket of silence. “However, there is a space for you within my walls should you choose to take me up on that offer.”

Nymira stares back at him with eyes wide and shaking, bright shimmering pools of black that could suck him in with her desire if he wasn’t careful. She chews on the idea, her gaze shifting from the elder priest to the younger, then back again.

“Nymira-” Cylion’s protest is quelled as quickly as it starts by a wave of Ailzea’s hand.

The Goddess fidgets.

“Father Restorer,” her voice catches and he waits for her to find her balance. She chances a glance at her brother, he stares back as though he means to bend her to his will with his mind. She shrinks. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I trust that your brothers will handle business while you are away.”

Now it is Ailzea’s turn to put the full brunt of his attention on Cylion, the younger priest does not flinch in the face of it, a stormy look taking hold of his own features. Both sets of wings flare and fold in on themselves in time with the breathing he fights hard to regulate.

Cylion exhales hard through his nose.

“Father Roatus,” he begins, silver tongue searching for a line to pull. “There are people here that rely on her here. She can’t be taken from her people.”

“That is a decision she will make when she has had her rest, should she choose to take my offer.”

Cylion opens his mouth to respond, but he pauses. His attention is somewhere else, brought toward the entrance to the room, by the sound of a low thud that spills into it. All eyes fall on Favion as he crouches into the doorway.

Immediately the elder Lefera’s attention is grabbed by the sight of Ailzea.

He breaks into an uneven grin.

“Favion,” Ailzea acknowledges him with a nod. “We were just discussing Nymira’s break from her duties.”

The hulk of a yellow blood stops just beyond the threshold and grips the doorframe, he works his jaw for a moment. Then he speaks.

“Interesting proposal,” he gravels, the words struggling through a rock tumbler before falling out of his mouth. “My sprout stays here.”

“It is not a request.” Ailzea asserts as he stands up.

A rattle of a growl shakes loose in the beast's chest, Cylion and his brother look between each other, Nymira takes a step behind the Restorer.

“Favion, I only asked you here so that your children are not made to explain to you what has occurred.” The Restorer turns his attention to the godling and nods again in her direction. “The decision is hers.”

There is a sharp snap, and a crack begins to form along the door frame from beneath Favion’s massive claw, then another silence descends on the group. The silence vies for dominance over the new wave of tense atmosphere that smothers them. Nymira says nothing, shrinking from her father and closer to the purple priest when he lets loose another growl and steps further into the room. This time the growl is punctuated by the sound of his teeth grinding together.

Cylion’s anger looks right at home on his father’s face.

Beyond the ferocity, Ailzea finds something else mixed into it. Something that he cannot place.

Not on Favion’s face, anyway, the way his lips always twisted into a fierce snarl ready to rip someone apart. Beyond that, there was something soft. A tenderness.

Love. He thinks. For his daughter.

And here she was hiding away from him.

“Nymira?” Ailzea asks softly, tearing his attention away from the hulk. “What do you say?”

“I would like to go with you.” She responds in a voice meant for a mouse, unable to rip her own eyes off of her father’s threat display. “Just… For a little while.”

“Sprout,” Favion advances, enough that Ailzea can make out the age which aids the deterioration that mars the yellow giant’s face. The ghost of a fearsome sneer finds itself locked behind the gentle expression he wears like a mask to look at his daughter with. “Why?”

There is a lull, the Restorer looks from Favion to his descendant behind him. The winged troll looks furious, staring coldly at his sister, once against doing his best to control her with that steely gaze.

Ailzea turns slightly to obscure her from his view.

Nymira breathes, he feels her grab hold of his robes from behind.

“Father,” her voice wavers. “You hurt my friends and everyone was ready to lie to me about it! Cylion has been cruel and he…” She hesitates, Ailzea imagines that she might’ve brought up Little Friend but thought better of it in present company. He is grateful for this. “He let a bad man take me away! To teach me some sort of lesson. He made sure I would forget things… That his words meant more to me than my own thoughts. That’s no way to treat someone you care about!” The words rush out of her quickly, a poorly made dam coming down in the face of her flood of emotion.

Favion stands statue still, teeth grinding all the while he processes the information. It would take a moment for him to catch it all even on his best day. Behind him, Cylion cannot help the growl that thunders from his chest. Bowl Cut fidgets with the edges of his shirt.

“I just need somewhere to breathe. Please, Father.”

Ailzea speaks before the broken yellow blood finds use of his mouth again. “Go, Nymira. Gather your things.”

“Okay. Thank you Father. Thank you, too, Father Restorer.” She says breathlessly and takes the long way around to the room’s exit so she does not risk crossing the path of her explosive brother and frozen father. Her failed prophets.

When she is safely out of the room, all compassion leaves Favion’s face. His expression twists into one of pure animosity, then his lips part into a snarl that brings Ailzea back to all of those daymares where his children are mutilated right before his eyes.

One of the brothers makes an involuntary sound.

The yellow blood advances on him, claw angled to grab him up by the horn.

Ailzea sighs.

“Favion. I have had enough of this!” Once again, the force that Ailzea manages is alien even to himself. “If you cannot behave civilly, return to your chambers!” This time his own voice rings loud in his ears, leaving behind the echoes of all the times in his youth that he’d been on the receiving end of one of his predecessor's tyrades.

He sounds just like Matere Roatus. That man’s voice on Ailzea’s tongue leaves a metallic taste behind. How many times was that line used on him, followed by the destruction of something dear to his heart?

Ailzea would never stoop so low.

When he refocuses on the scene in front of him, the beast of a troll has already fallen still. He stands in a neutral position, perhaps awaiting an order. At the same time, the pair of brothers have found themselves on the other side of the kitchen, not keen on a bath of blood if it came down to it.

“Favion, you will let her do as she wishes.”

Favion grunts, and though he appears to comply, contempt poisons his features and taints the air between them.

Cylion opens his mouth to protest, anger paints him in a grim light, but Ailzea shoots it down with a glower of his own.

“The game is done. Nymira has made her decision.”

#the restorer #favion #cylion #long post #coko writes sometimes

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gumnut-logic · 4 months ago

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The Awards (Part 2)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Alexander Sweetapple series

This one was a challenge and being Australian and not a Kiwi, I beg forgiveness if I've messed up anything. Many, many thanks to @onereyofstarlight I owe her Haighs chocolate for consultation fees on this one (she actually wrote the intro).

Being a Sweetapple fic, this is m/m, and although they don't go beyond the occasional kiss and hug, if that isn't your thing, this isn't your fic.

I hope you enjoy it :D

-o-o-o-

“Tēnā koutou katoa.”

The room was already silent for the man’s mere presence on the stage. Scott Tracy stood tall, gazing out at the audience, and if he was honest with himself, Alex couldn’t help but feel proud to be an employee, sitting here in the audience, and represented by him.

“Ko Aerana te whakapaparanga mai. Nō Ngā Whenua Tōpū o Amerika au.” Scott straightened just a little. “My ancestry is from Ireland and I am from the United States of America.”

“Ko reo kōrero ō Tracy Industries ahau. I am the spokesperson of Tracy Industries.”

“Ko Scott Tracy tōku ingoa. My name is Scott Tracy.”

His eyes raked the room.

“It is the difficult and the horrifying that remind us of who we are. When circumstances threaten us and those we love. It is those times our hearts must be strong. To reach out and help family, friends and strangers alike.”

“You are a community which has seen terrible loss and heartache. But you are also a community of strong and defiant people who saw suffering and stepped up to help.” A pause. “I know. I was there.”

The room rumbled in acknowledgement.

“This is an opportunity to thank those who were pillars in their community, the iwi leaders who organised food and shelter, those who volunteered their time and energy to look after one another."

“Every one who saw a need and offered to help, all of you should be proud to be a part of Te Tai Rāwhiti because the sun does indeed dawn first on a very strong and caring people.”

He paused a moment and the room was full of an echoing silence as if everyone was holding their breath, simply hanging on the words of Mr Scott Tracy.

“So, it was with great honour I accepted this opportunity to open the Tairāwhiti Super Hero Awards 2065. While International Rescue might make a dramatic entrance,” the crowd murmured and Mr Tracy smiled just a little, “we should never forget the real heroes amongst us - those who step up and do what needs doing.”

For the briefest of moments that blue gaze settled on Alex before drawing the rest of the room in behind him.

“So thank you to all of you, for great service rendered.” Another small smile. “Ngā mihi nui.”

Mr Tracy stepped back from the lectern and the room erupted into applause. Alex found himself clapping like a lunatic.

But then this was Scott Tracy, Thunderbird One.

Beside Alex, Virgil was clapping just as hard, but he was grinning at Alex, not his big brother.

Scott shook the hand of the Master of Ceremonies and quietly walked off the stage as the lights shifted, heralding the opening performance of the night.

Alex’s eyes widened as students from the local high school, one of the most damaged by the quake, stepped onto the stage and into the rhythm of haka and welcome.

Knowing exactly how these people had been affected, and to see them here, proud and defiant, Alex’s heart swelled.

He lost himself in the lights and sound.

At some point, Scott slipped in on the other side of Virgil. The two brothers acknowledging each other unspoken, but throughout the ceremony Virgil held Alex’s hand.

And it was ever so warm.

At the end of the welcoming ceremony, the Prime Minister took to the podium, her stance as strong as her speech. Her acknowledgement of those lost, those who suffered, those who stepped up, and those who saved - and yes, she mentioned International Rescue particularly - Alex squeezed Virgil’s hand. It was heartwarming, politician or no.

And then came the awards.

The Prime Minister stood beside the MC and as names were announced and people stepped up from the audience, stories were told of heroic deeds.

The woman who sheltered three children with her body as a building collapsed over them. Thunderbird Two had pulled them out, finding her physically holding a slab of concrete from falling.

Her hoverchair separated from the crowd and hissed down the aisle to the stage.

A mechanic who had set up a care centre in his backyard, gathering locals who had lost their homes, finding blankets and bedding, and offering shelter from the weather in his workshop.

Amongst the recipients there were those who could not attend and those who had lost their lives helping others. Family members and friends accepted the awards from the hands of the Prime Minister.

The mood was both somber and proud.

“Alexander Sweetapple.” Alex startled and suddenly found both Virgil and his mother ushering him to his feet. “Caught in the Tairāwhiti museum collapse, Alexander was able to save the thirteen people caught with him before the building slipped into the Taruheru River.”

Alex was walking down the aisle towards the stage. He stepped up into the light, the Prime Minister’s smile all for him, and he shook her hand and accepted the trophy and tried his best to smile and not drop it.

His fingers fumbled.

Not drop it.

“Thank you for your service.” Her brown eyes were sincere and both her hands clasped his. “Thank you.”

He managed a smile and a nod, before turning back towards the audience. Somewhere out there, in that haze of bright light, was his mum, Messrs Tracy, and Virgil.

The thought of his smile…and what happened after saving those thirteen people…

Alex really didn’t need the piece of plastic in his hands.

So, of course, that was when he dropped it.

The thud as it hit the wooden stage floor was loud, the echo bouncing around the theatre.

A rumble of amusement from the crowd swelled as he stumbled to pick it up.

Grab the piece of plastic and get off the stage.

He managed it with as much decorum as he had left, only tripping on the stairs once in his haste. Walking up the aisle again, however, all he could see was fond amusement in the eyes that caught his and it mollified him a little. That feeling of just ‘being in it together’ reassured his thudding heart.

His mum and Virgil welcomed him back to his seat, both hugging him, one after the other.

The gentle kiss to his ear as heavy lifting arms wrapped around him was enough to slow his heart rate down a notch…okay, not slow, really, but more redirect its passion from terror to…other things.

The rest of the ceremony was a blur. Panic was exhausting and he found himself resting his head on Virgil’s shoulder as hero after hero accepted their award.

At some point Scott climbed out of his seat and walked back down to the stage to accept a thank you to International Rescue from the Prime Minister - everyone knew IR didn’t accept awards, but Aotearoa had every right to say thank you.

Mr Scott’s smile and Erica’s favourite dimples charmed the audience and the Prime Minister…who, come to think of it, was single…

But the thank you was the last speech of the night. Scott returned to his seat again and the final performance roared onto the stage. Alex was quite comfortable with his head on Virgil’s shoulder, almost snuggled up beside him.

Sure, someone could photograph them, but at this point Alex didn’t care. Besides, it wasn’t like they were trying to hide anything. A good percentage of the world had already seen them playing tonsil hockey on social media, this was small time in comparison.

Virgil turning and kissing him gently on the forehead just sealed the deal.

But eventually the ceremony came to an end and the audience took to their feet. Alex straightened up, but his hand did not leave Virgil’s, even as they filed out with the crowd.

Iz, of course, appeared from nowhere, she and Kayo bracketing their party as they moved into the foyer where a buffet had been set up.

Alex brightened. A little kai and definitely some coffee would help.

Well, it would have if some of it hadn’t been thrown at them.

-o-o-o-

TBC

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #virgil tracy #scott tracy #alexander sweetapple #nuttyfic #romance #virgil tracy/alexander sweetapple

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 6 months ago

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vote blue

* * * *

Joe Biden’s gifts to America

August 2, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

Over his half-century of public service, Joe Biden bestowed many gifts on America. True, like every politician with a fifty-year record, he has made his share of mistakes. But when it mattered most, Joe Biden stepped into the breach to defend democracy and provide hope to America when it flagged.

He stepped up to challenge Trump in 2020 because he believed he could save America from the horrors of a second Trump term. He was right. That was a gift.

Over the next four years, he restored decency, compassion, and fairness to the governance of great nation. That was a gift.

He proposed and passed sweeping legislation that made historic investments in fighting climate change, protecting the environment, ending child poverty, rebuilding our infrastructure, and bringing chip manufacturing back to America’s shores. That was a gift.

He restored the broken relationships between America and its allies. He was able to do so because our allies recognized that he was a good and decent man whose word could be trusted. That was a gift.

Today, Joe Biden’s gift of renewed international alliances resulted in the freedom of three American citizens wrongfully detained by Russia. The exchange would not have happened except for the relationship of trust and goodwill between President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The German Chancellor agreed to release a Russian assassin held in a German prison. In agreeing to the deal, Chancellor Scholz told Biden, “For you, I will do this.” See WaPo, Inside the deal that led to a blockbuster prisoner swap between U.S., Russia. (This article is accessible to all.)

The complex deal involved 24 detainees and 7 countries—the most complicated prisoner swap between the US and Russia in history. President Biden continued to work his relationships with foreign leaders to close the deal until the very moment he announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. Joe Biden’s selfless efforts were a gift.

The complex deal could not have happened without Joe Biden and Kamala Harris or the cooperation of six US allies. Vice President Kamala Harris played an active role in the negotiations, including private meetings with the Slovenian Prime Minister and German Chancellor at the annual Munich security conference.

The complexity of the deal is beyond the comprehension or attention span of Donald Trump—who boasted that he could secure the release of US detainees from Russia without giving any concessions to Putin. After Joe Biden finished his press conference announcing the deal, a reporter shouted a question about Trump's boast that “that he could have gotten the hostages out without giving anything in exchange.”

Biden stopped, returned to the lectern, and asked, “Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” See embedded video, here.

Within an hour of completing negotiations for the swap, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Thirty-minutes later, he endorsed Kamala Harris for president. At a time when party leaders and podcast pundits were calling for “mini-primaries” and an “open convention,” Joe Biden had the wisdom and foresight to realize that Democrats needed unity and certainty.

Kamala Harris had earned Joe Biden’s endorsement, and he gave it promptly and enthusiastically. Forty-eight hours later, Kamala Harris was the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. That was Joe Biden’s final gift—a seamless transition that has allowed Democrats to overtake Trump in less than two weeks. Kamala Harris deserves great credit for that result, but so, too, does Joe Biden for his selfless actions, wisdom, and political foresight.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

#Joe Biden #Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #Kamala Harris #Biden Harris Accomplishments #election 2024 #prisoner exchange

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silverjae · 5 months ago

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Explaining my ducktales au part2 : The Duck Avenger.

! Warning : Kinda graphic depictions of violence!

A 14 year old Donald came across a trap door as he was cleaning a new villa his uncle had just bought. He fell into a basement with a book on a lectern, a manaquin with a hero suit and a box containing things like a grappling hook, rope, ect.

In the book was a story of a vigilante from the 1600s who was pretty much the duck aquivelent of Robin Hood.

He took the suit and adjusted and added things to make it more his style. With the suit he played pranks on rich people (mostly his uncle) and people who were rude to his friends and family.

After saving someone about 3 months later and accidentally being recorded he named himself Paperinik, dubbed the Duck Avenger by the public, now duckburgs hero.

His main villains were the Evronians, the mad ducktor (who I'll explain in another part) and The Raider.

When he was 17 he was attacked by Trauma, a Evronian mutant with the power to bring up the enemy's, well, trauma.

He had flash backs to the first adventure he ever went on (he was 6 and it was meant by Scrooge to cheer the twins up after their parents funeral) and his parents death.

That was the first time he killed.

After he broke out of it all he saw was red. Literally. It was like a tint covered the world, meaning he didn't notice the pavement and his face was painted the colour.

He had nightmares about the day for years after and on rare occasions still does. It's half the reason he quit the first time and one of the major reasons he developed PTSD.

After ending the erovians leader, causing them to run off, he stepped down as duckburgs hero and joined the Navy, 3 days after his and his twins birthday.

The second time he was the Duck Avenger is much less documented and known of by the public, him being around 20 to 24.

The Double Duck comics and The Legend Of The Three Caballeros are canon here and they both overlapped with the second rise of Paperinik.

6 months after he became Double Duck, working for The Cloak and Dagger Government Agency of Fiction, which is a sister agency to S.H.U.S.H, he decided to become the Avenger again.

Man, this guys stress levels were through the roof no wonder why he was graying before his thirtys.

He fought some new and old villains, sometimes with the help of the Three Caballeros, Clover Leaf and rarely Prime Blossom (Super Daisy).

He was much more reckless this time around and nearly died more times than his friends would have liked.

His family would be included if they knew. The only family who knew were his cousins Kildare, Gladstone, Nancy, Abner and his half-uncle Gideon.

He only stopped being a hero when his sister, Della, became pregnant (eggnant???) with his triplet nephews.

There is alot of stuff and smaller details I left out because this is already long enough in my opinion and I'm tired.

My au is partially based off of the fics on ao3 "The Secret Biography Of Donald Duck" and "Furious Revenge" Which are both amazing fics and I would definitely recommend if you like crossovers and Donald Duck as much as I do.

Edit: forgot to mention that Donalds related to the vigilante he based himself off of.

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misfitwashere · 6 months ago

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Joe Biden’s gifts to America

August 2, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

AUG 2

He stepped up to challenge Trump in 2020 because he believed he could save America from the horrors of a second Trump term. He was right. That was a gift.

Over the next four years, he restored decency, compassion, and fairness to the governance of great nation. That was a gift.

He restored the broken relationships between America and its allies. He was able to do so because our allies recognized that he was a good and decent man whose word could be trusted. That was a gift.

Biden stopped, returned to the lectern, and asked, “Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” See embedded video, here.

#Robert Hubbell

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svtskneecaps · 9 months ago

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literally it's 3am where i live and i'm on mobile but FUCK IT i haven't posted any actual writing in like a YEAR on this blog whose description include the words "I WRITE" and i can't tell if i'm even going anywhere with this so fuck it under the cut is the prospective absolute mess of the first chapter of the flipo family time loop fic. (for clarity, flipo family as in slime, mariana, and juanaflippa) this covers loop 0, aka the relevant parts of canon. words: 1630

parts of it i popped off with and other parts i hate; up to you to identify them. also the italics and other formatting got erased when i copy pasted and i'm re-adding all of it by hand so if i missed a spot, no i didn't. if i missed an accent on a letter in spanish that was a typo, if i missed a ¡ or ¿ that may have been on purpose.

oh and for obvious reasons, content warning for mentions and mild descriptions of child death and child murder. no blood, and most of it is a three word mention; i'd say the brief paragraph beginning "Tilín didn't scream" is most of the reason this warning exists.

Charlie Slimecicle stepped off the train.

He’d been hoping for a bright, sunny day to start their vacation, but was sorely disappointed. The portal had apparently taken them pretty far, since they’d gone from noon to night time. Talk about jetlag. They hadn’t even been on a plane.

“What happened to the other guys?” he wondered aloud as he stepped onto the platform.

“Yeah no clue,” Phil said, scanning the empty station. “Thought they’d meet us here.”

“Guys!” one of the Spanish speakers--Vegetta, he’d said, when they’d all met up at the first station--called, from a lectern at the wall. “There is a book!”

They crowded around as he read the instructions aloud--something about pressure plates, Slime wasn’t paying that close of attention. He was a little more preoccupied with making sure it only felt like his brain was dripping out of his ears. That would be kind of embarrassing.

Which was not to say that he wasn’t enjoying the constant onslaught of people talking over each other using words he may or may not understand. In fact, it was the opposite; he was frankly thriving in the absolute chaos that kicked back up around him as a timer appeared in the wrist communicators they’d been provided along with their tickets.

“Como se dice ‘we are going to die now’?” He giggled, chasing Phil and Fit to one end of the station.

“¡Vamos a morir!” shouted Spiderman, echoed seconds later by the black bear in the collared shirt.

Giddy over the high of attempting to use his high school foreign language for the first time maybe ever, Slime absolutely didn’t contribute much to solving the puzzle, and before long the sound of the timer ticking down was accompanied by a loud buzzing alarm.

“It’s been an honor!” he shrieked at the top of his lungs. “It’s been an honor!”

The bear ran past them again, shouting, “I’m going to die!” in English this time.

“Adiós amigos!” Slime yelled.

The countdown ended.

And then his communicator buzzed, and there was a video playing on the screen, showing a cartoonish yellow duck in front of a blurry beach stock photo. He skimmed it absently--some generic welcoming message and another side quest for them--distracted by Maximus audibly losing his shit laughing across the station.

“Come on, I’m trying to take a vacation, I gotta work now?” Fit complained. “This is ridiculous.”

Slime wanted to jump on that bit, but the message cut off with coordinates marred by static and the noise of the emergency weather alert system and he lost his train of thought completely.

“I got the English book!” Spreen called, holding it with two fingers like it had personally offended him.

“English leader,” Vegetta said, seeming to find that amusing.

“English leader.” Spreen laughed and flicked the book away. Slime stepped back but somehow it still nailed him in the chest.

“Guess I’m reading then,” he said cheerfully.

“In Spanish?” Maximus said.

“Um.”

Vegetta called something, backing across the plaza with the book open in his hands. Phil backed up to the wall.

“Here,” Phil instructed, “we’ll read it here.”

“Okay okay.” He flicked it open. “So we have to get water wheel planks--”

Their peace lasted a grand total of thirty seconds as voices suddenly began shouting, overlapping in chaotic chorus.

“What is that?” Fit demanded.

“Is that coming from the other side?” Phil stared up at the top of the wall.

“This is the thinnest thick wall I’ve ever seen,” Slime said, giddy laughter bubbling out of him again. “Is this thing made out of pencil shavings? If I sneeze on it, is there gonna be a hole?”

“Nevermind, we’ll read it over here.” Phil dragged them away again, but the Spanish speakers were dispersing into the trees.

“Forget the book,” Fit said, “follow them!”

(In the end it was explosives that took the wall down, which in hindsight was a precursor to how a not insignificant portion of time on the island was spent. The first day, however, it was just funny, much like everything else.)

(That was to say, the first first day.)

The communicator had indicated that today there was something special planned, so he made an extra effort to wake up.

“Morning Jaiden!” he called to his upstairs neighbor.

“Hi Charlie!” He could hear her farming through the wall. “Glad you woke up on time!”

“Well you know, you know, El Backflipo couldn’t miss it,” he joked, sifting through his backpack. “Got any spare food? I’ll trade you uno backflipo.”

“I have so much toast, come here and get some, free of charge.”

With a quick backflip and some toast to start the day, he popped open the map.

“There’s a lot of people down the wall,” he noted, their green dots so clustered they formed one. “Wanna check it out?”

“Yeah sure.” Jaiden tossed some seeds into a chest. “Do you know what this event’s gonna be?”

“I have no idea,” he admitted cheerfully.

She laughed. “Yeah, me neither. I guess there’s an egg involved, but that’s all I know.”

He dug around in his backpack for a paraglider, nodding along. “Yeah, yeah, un huevo, I get you.” Shuffling the landmine from Vegetta to one side, he yanked out his glider and threw himself out her window. “Let’s go!”

(nothing like getting struck by lightning to wake a guy up in the morning)

Slime fiddled with the communicator as he waited for the line of people to get through the ticket machine; he already had his own, a nice B for Backflipo. The new live translations still boggled his mind. He had to fight the urge to chant weird shit under his breath, just to see what the bubbles would say.

He paid a little extra attention when Mariana walked up to the machine. That guy seemed cool. They’d done that pequeño dormir together on day one, and he had a good sense of humor. Egg parenting would probably be funny.

He was thrilled to see the B for Backflipo on the ticket Mariana stepped away with, even if Mariana was decidedly less so. This was gonna be good.

(it was, and it wasn’t)

So, Mariana wasn’t exactly the coparent of dreams. Then again, Slime was pretty sure Mariana could say the same about him. In fact he was pretty sure Mariana had said the same, but in Spanish, when he wasn’t checking the translation.

It was great. They thought they’d killed a child immediately and then decided to fake their own child’s death to get away with it, and then confessed their sins to a bilingual angel and built a farm and then he buried himself beneath an improvised cross and went into a coma until his sins were forgiven, or something, except his sins weren’t forgiven in time to save his own child’s life.

And then Juanaflippa was dead. Dead at Mariana’s hand.

His bitch wife killed their daughter.

(Everything went faster, after that.)

Slime wanted to kill him.

Slime wanted to kill him for killing their fucking daughter, but of course, Mariana couldn’t even be bothered to be around to take care of her alive, never mind to pay for his crimes when she died by his hand!

(in a better world, his rage started and ended there. in a better world, the anger fizzled out with the lack of a target.

this was not that world)

There couldn’t be an Egg Event with no eggs.

If he killed them all, it would bring her back.

(in a worse world, he succeeded. in a worse world, the Egg Event ended there.

this was not that world)

They held a trial.

If he won, it would bring her back.

(in another world, he didn’t convince them. in another world, they left his daughter in Hell.

this was not that world)

Tilín was still before she hit the ground.

Tilín didn’t scream. Maybe they didn’t have time. It happened so fast. He was sure it happened fast. Almost too fast. But everything went so fast, now, even though Flippa was back. Yet, time slowed down for this, like a rubberneck driving past a highway accident, watching him desperately trying to shock their heart back into motion.

“YOU KILL MY BEST FRIENDS,” Flippa wrote. He begged her to understand. She wrote, “i can’t believe it.”

She wrote, “I HATE YOU.”

(in a better world, the error would have been caught in April instead of July.

this was not that world)

His daughter fell to his bitch wife’s sword. The same way. The next day.

They’d only just gotten her back. And Mariana killed her again.

He only left eggxile for the funeral. She wouldn’t stay dead, but he had to be there.

Time went even faster after that. He was Gegg, or maybe Gegg was him, or maybe Gegg was Gegg, or maybe. . . ?

He went back to eggxile.

He wasn’t leaving without them. Tilín. Juanaflippa. He would do whatever was necessary. He would pray to any higher power. Lil J still owed him a goddamn favor, but the guy wouldn’t pick up his calls. Maybe if he put more shit in the shrine; angels liked shiny shit, didn’t they? He went back to the mine, where the gasses swirled in his head. He built the shrine. He mined. He built the shrine.

He went back to the mine.

“This is where I sit, this is where my bitch wife sits, and this is where my daughter sits, if I had one!”

He’d said that before. No he hadn’t. Yes he had.

No, he just needed to clear his head.

Charlie Slimecicle went back to the mine.

Charlie Slimecicle stepped off the train.

#qsmp #qsmp fanfiction #qsmp slimecicle #qsmp juanaflippa #won't tag his partner since he didn't get to star much in this part #this idea is at its core a flipo FAMILY fic though it starts out with slime #just. the problem is getting to that point. bc beyond these words i have like 500 more lmao #for anyone curious for directors commentary in the tags:#pequeño dormir' is on purpose; i figured that would be a mistake slime would make at day 14 on the island #i also omitted the ¿ and ¡ from slime's spanish dialogue for the same reason; it's as close to an actual accent as i can get in text #(accent as in accented speech not accented letter; speaking spanish with an american accent)#slime's quote at the end about where people sit is taken verbatim from one of his streams #at time of posting it is available on his vods channel titled 'we won the war. (qsmp)'#a lot of the day 1 dialogue and flippa's dialogue from tilín's death is also verbatim #oh and the sequence from the 'we won the war' vod carries a lot of weight in the idea (wasn't the spark but it filled some gaps)#for me the cave gases are what drives every loop; time rolls back whenever slime inhales too much gas and 'forgets'#i don't have exact mechanics about it but suffice it to say if ANYONE were to spend too much time in this random ass cave #they would also loop back in time; slime's just the one who in this timeline Happened to discover it #shut up vic #block game brainrot #yea idk i just liked some of the dialogue tbh i think this gets super messy after they get flippa and then brings it back around at the mine #it's got some messy pacing in that middle bit but the foundation of a time loop story is its loop 0 #that's what every loop after it has to call back to; that's the beauty of a time loop story #how is this different from loop 0; how is it the same #we've come so far only to get nowhere at all yknow #i'm a fan of stories rhyming but ESPECIALLY time loops so this is the setup for a lot of that #dude i gotta send this i've been sitting on parts of this draft for a year #may someone besides me read these words 🙏 thank you and goodnight #if people say nice things maybe i'll finally wring more words out of my brain. idk.#long tags

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simshousewindsor · 8 months ago

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By Cameron Dorly | Published by SNN

Rainier, Prince consort attends a reception and gala dinner at the 8th Commonwealth Forestry Society’s annual gala in Norfolk. The Prince consort addressed visiting dignitaries and guests at the gala dinner as Norfolk plays host to the first Forestry Society gala outside of Greater Easton.

The Prince consort, wearing a blue tuxedo jacket, was greeted by crowds of adoring fans. The event, which lasts for two days, is being held outside of Easton for the first time.

His Royal Highness, a fervent supporter of action on climate change, told the gathering of 1,600 political and business leaders from over 115 countries the deterioration of ��nature’s capital reserves” like water and soils can cause direct impacts on food and energy security.

The Prince consort was met by Guest speaker, prominent Windenburg architect and board leader, Bryan Shaffer, a Norfolk native.

Norfolk, about 130 miles east of Greater Easton, is home to Similhill Forestry the UK’s leading sustainable forest and timber harvesting company. As part of the Commonwealth Forestry Society, which is the UK’s largest forestry and timber business, Similhill offers a comprehensive range of services to woodland owners, public bodies, farmers, landowners and private companies across the UK.

The Prince met delegates before taking to the lectern and while much of the discussion was on congratulating The Prince on the recent coronation, it primarily focused on the desire to forge business links outside the UK.

“The tragic conflict in Sulani provides a terrifyingly graphic example, where a severe drought for the last four years has decimated Sulani’s rural economy, driving many farmers off their fields and into cities where, already, food was in short supply.” he said. “This depletion of natural capital, inexplicably, little reported in the media, was a significant contributor to the social tension that exploded with such desperate results.”

Shaffer said the importance of holding the forum in Norfolk could not be understated.

“The Prince coming here is a positive event at a time when everybody’s trying to create schisms,” he said. "The President, Trustees, Executive Committee and members of the Commonwealth Forestry Society are extremely proud of the work the Prince consort is doing. As Patron of the CFS, he is a true champion of the value of forests throughout the Commonwealth."

#SNN has the tea #SNN on ts4 #simshousewindsor on snn #simshousewindsor #simshousewindsor royal engagements #simshousewindsor simblr #simshousewindsor ts4 #simshousewindsor monarchy #simblr #simshousewindsor royalty #ts4 #ts4 royalty #sims 4 monarchy #ts4 simblr

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mariacallous · 8 months ago

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Two months ago, Lin Rui-siang, a young Taiwanese man wearing black-rimmed glasses and a white polo shirt, stood behind a lectern emblazoned with the crest of the St. Lucia police, giving a presentation titled “Cyber Crime and Cryptocurrency” in nearly fluent English to a roomful of cops from the tiny Caribbean country.

The St. Lucia government would later issue a press release lauding the success of Lin's training course, which had been organized by the Taiwanese embassy, where Lin worked as a diplomatic specialist in IT. The statement boasted that 30 officers had learned “nuances of the dark web" and cryptocurrency tracing skills from Lin, who had “used his professional background and qualifications in the field" to teach them how to better combat cybercrime.

Only earlier this week did it become clear exactly what Lin's “professional background and qualifications in the field” allegedly entailed, seemingly unbeknownst to either his Taiwanese employers or his St. Lucian law enforcement trainees. For nearly four years, according to the US Justice Department, 23-year-old Lin ran a dark-web drug market called Incognito that authorities say enabled the sale of at least $100 million worth of narcotics, ranging from MDMA to heroin for cryptocurrencies including bitcoin and monero. That was before Lin's alleged theft of his own users' funds earlier this year and then his arrest last week by the FBI in New York's JFK airport.

Over his years working as a cryptocurrency-focused intern at Cathay Financial Holdings in Taipei and then as a young IT staffer at St. Lucia's Taiwanese embassy, Lin allegedly lived a double life as a dark-web figure who called himself “Pharoah" or “faro”—a persona whose track record qualifies as remarkably strange and contradictory even for the dark web, where secret lives are standard issue. In his short career, Pharoah launched Incognito, built it into a popular crypto black market with some of the dark web's better safety and security features, then abruptly stole the funds of the market's customers and drug dealers in a so-called “exit scam” and, in a particularly malicious new twist, extorted those users with threats of releasing their transaction details.

During those same busy years, Pharoah also launched a web service called Antinalysis, designed to defeat crypto money laundering countermeasures—only for Lin, who prosecutors say controlled that Pharoah persona, to later refashion himself as a crypto-focused law enforcement trainer. Finally, despite his supposed expertise in cryptocurrency tracing and digital privacy, it was Lin's own relatively sloppy money trails that, the DOJ claims, helped the FBI to trace his real identity.

Among all those incongruities, though, it's the image of Lin giving his cryptocurrency crime training in St. Lucia—which Lin proudly posted to his LinkedIn account—that shocked Tom Robinson, a cofounder of the blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, who has long tracked Lin's alleged Pharoah alter ego. “This is an alleged dark-net market admin standing in front of police officers, showing them how to use blockchain analytics tools to track down criminals online,” says Robinson. “Assuming he is who the FBI says he is, it's incredibly ironic and brazen.”

Pharoah the Kingpin—and Extortionist

Lin has been charged with not only narcotics conspiracy and money laundering but also running a “continuing criminal enterprise,” the so-called “kingpin statute” reserved for organized crime leaders who allegedly oversaw at least five employees. For that charge alone, he faces a potential life sentence.

In the DOJ's criminal complaint against Lin, it points to a handwritten document the FBI pulled from his email, which appears to sketch out a flow chart for a dark-web market's mechanics. The complaint's FBI affidavit says Lin emailed himself the sketch in March 2020 when he was at most 19 years old. It describes functionality such as how “vendors” and “buyers” would register, make purchases, and encrypt shipping addresses. Seven months later, Lin would allegedly launch Incognito Market.

According to the FBI, the market took nearly a year to catch on, with virtually no sales during that time. But by late 2021, Incognito had started to attract users, and by the middle of 2022, the market had drawn enough vendors and sellers to generate more than $1.5 million a month in sales.

A 2022 Twitter thread about Incognito posted by Eileen Ormsby, an author of several dark-web-focused books including The Darkest Web, shows how the market by that time had added features that may have helped it to catch the attention of security- and safety-conscious users. It required that new users demonstrate they could use the encryption tool PGP before entering the market, prompted them to take a security quiz, allowed buyers to spend the more privacy-focused cryptocurrency monero as well as bitcoin, encouraged dealers to post results from a fentanyl test to certify their product was “fent free,” and even experimented with democratic voting for market-wide decisions.

By the summer of 2023, Incognito had spiked in popularity and was approaching $5 million a month in sales. Then in March of this year, the site suddenly dropped offline, taking all the funds stored in buyers' and sellers' wallets with it. A few days later, the site reappeared with a new message on its homepage. “Expecting to hear the last of us yet?” it read. “We got one final little nasty surprise for y'all.”

The message explained that Incognito was now essentially blackmailing its former users: It had stored their messages and transaction records, it said, and added that it would be creating a “whitelist portal” where users could pay a fee—which for some dealers would later be set as high as $20,000—to remove their data before all the incriminating information was leaked online at the end of this month. “YES THIS IS AN EXTORTION!!!” the message added.

In retrospect, Ormsby says that the site's apparent user-friendliness and its security features were perhaps a multiyear con laying the groundwork for its endgame, a kind of user extortion never seen before in dark-web drug markets. “Maybe the whole thing was set up to create a false sense of security,” Ormsby says. “The extorting thing is completely new to me. But if you've lulled people into a sense of security, I guess it's easier to extort them.”

In total, Incognito Market promised to leak more than half a million drug transaction records if buyers and sellers didn't pay to remove them from the data dump. It's still not clear whether the market's administrator—Lin, according to prosecutors, whom they accuse of personally carrying out the extortion campaign—planned to follow through on the threat: He appears to have been arrested before the deadline set for the victims of the Incognito blackmail.

An Expert in ‘Anti Anti-Money Laundering’

At the same time the FBI says Lin was laying the groundwork for this double-cross, he also appears to have briefly tried engineering an entirely different scheme. In the summer of 2021, during Incognito Market's relatively quiet first year, Lin's alleged alter ego, Pharoah, launched a service called Antinalysis, a website designed to analyze blockchains and let users check—for a fee—whether their cryptocurrency could be connected to criminal transactions.

In a post to the dark-web market forum Dread, Pharoah made clear that Antinalysis was designed not to help anti-money-laundering investigators, but rather those who sought to evade them—presumably including his own dark-web market's users. “Our goals do not lie in aiding the surveillance autocracy of state-sponsored agencies,” Pharoah's post read. “This service is dedicated to individuals that have the need to possess complete privacy on the blockchain, offering a perspective from the opponent's point of view in order for the user to comprehend the possibility of his/her funds getting flagged down under autocratic illegal charges.”

After independent cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs wrote about the Antinalysis service in August 2021, describing it as an “anti anti-money laundering service for crooks,” Pharoah posted another message complaining that Antinalysis had lost access to its blockchain data source, which Krebs had identified as the anti-money-laundering tool AMLBot, and that it would be going offline. “Stay posted and fuck LE," Pharoah wrote, using the abbreviation LE to mean “law enforcement.” Antinalysis eventually returned, however, and pivoted last year to acting instead as a service for swapping bitcoin for monero and vice versa.

Meanwhile, Lin appears to have maintained his obsession with cryptocurrency tracing and blockchain analysis: His final LinkedIn post last week before his arrest in New York announced that he had become a certified user of Reactor, the crypto tracing tool sold by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. “I'm excited to share that I've completed Chainalysis's new qualification: Chainalysis Reactor Certification (CRC)!” Lin wrote in Mandarin. His last X post shows a Chainalysis diagram of money flows between dark-web markets and cryptocurrency exchanges.

It's not clear whether Lin obtained his Chainalysis certification to bolster a new career training law enforcement in blockchain analysis or, if US prosecutors are to be believed, to advance his previous alleged career as a dark-web criminal. But it raises the troubling possibility that a former dark-web kingpin—one who was still extorting his own users—was perhaps playing both sides of the crypto tracing game, says Elliptic's Tom Robinson.

“There’s a larger issue here about bad actors accessing blockchain analytics tools,” says Robinson. “That is a potentially risky situation, where someone who’s in the process of laundering proceeds of crime can check in commercially available tools whether they have laundered them such that they can get away with it.” Running certain checks in those tools might even allow someone to determine if they're being actively investigated by law enforcement, Robinson says.

WIRED reached out to Chainalysis to ask about Lin's Reactor certification and what sort of safeguards prevent criminals from using the company's software, but the company declined to comment.

If Lin did hope to evade law enforcement by becoming an expert in crypto tracing himself, he was far too late to avoid creating his own blockchain trail of evidence: In January of this year, the FBI says it somehow identified a central Incognito server and obtained a search warrant for its contents. That allowed investigators to identify a bitcoin wallet stored there, which the FBI says Lin had also carelessly used to pay web registrar Namecheap for four web domains—including one that tracked which dark-web markets were online or down—and register them under his own name.

Although the FBI says Lin tried to swap his bitcoins for harder-to-trace monero before cashing out the cryptocurrency at an exchange, the criminal complaint points to timing and amount correlations that nonetheless allowed the FBI to follow his funds to a crypto exchange where he allegedly liquidated the dirty funds. That exchange account, too, was registered in Lin's real name, according to the DOJ.

The operational security mistakes the FBI describes suggest that, regardless of which side of the cryptocurrency cat-and-mouse game Lin intended to end up on, he was far from a criminal mastermind. His brief, strange journey from alleged kingpin to crypto crime expert ultimately provides plenty of lessons to criminals and law enforcement alike—though probably not the ones he intended.

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dreamdragoness · 1 year ago

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THUD!

The sudden sound of something falling caught Jhula off-guard. The Archives were always a quiet place, even when she wasn't the only one inside. The thud combined with the acoustics of the room made her think of thunder. After her heart slowed to it's calmed rhythm, Jhula unlocked the door to the Restricted Section. She had only read one or two books from this area, careful so as to not get caught and be punished. But as the Archivist of Silk Cradle, it was her job to make sure nothing was out of place in this section.

As she traversed the aisles, many of the books' titles caught her curiosity. One was a book on magic runes. Another looked like some sort of military manuals. There were even books that, from what she could tell from the titles, were more centered on...carnal interests. Jhula blushed in embarrassment at the last one as she focused on finding the book that dared to fall off its place in her library.

And at the very last aisle, she found it. A grimoire that held intricate occult symbols with a pentagram as the main focus of the dark red-and-black book. Jhula wasn't sure why, but she felt drawn to this particular book.

"What's this?" she thought as she picked up the book and placed it on a nearby lectern.

After double-checking to make sure that she was alone, Jhula placed her hand on the book. It wasn't like this book was from Shamura's vault. She was the goddamn Archivist of Silk Cradle! If she wanted to know the contents of this book, what was stopping her?

And yet, as she touched the book, a sense of dread filled her. The same dread she would normally reserve for Silent Hill. Slowly, her heart began to pick up. Her instincts screamed at her in two different voices, telling her to both open and not open the book. That there was something sinister and yet helpful in this.

"What am I doing? It's just a book, Jhula. It's just a book."

And yet her gut was telling her it was more than that. Still, she took in a deep breath and flipped opened the book.

She had no specific page in mind. Just grabbed a section and opened it. Jhula's eyes then scanned the contents of the tome. There were pages upon pages of different rituals, unknown festival plans, and doctrines that were unfamiliar to her. But it was the image at the top that made her realize what this book was: a black crown with a red eye.

The infamous Red Crown of the One Who Waits.

Jhula gasped in shock. This was a book that high priests and priestesses would have been given by their respective bishop ages ago! A manual on how to run a cult when said bishop was away or how to properly perform their roles as members of their leader's inner circle. High Priests and Priestesses were considered the second-in-command to the gods, the proper envoy amongst the disciples. This alarmed Jhula for two reasons.

First, there hasn't been a High Priest or High Priestess for over a thousand years. The Bishops had long-ceased installing them after their battle with the One Who Waits. Which brings up the second alarm in Jhula's mind.

This book was for the High Priests and Priestesses of the Bishop of the Red Crown. Which begs the question:

Why was it here in the restricted section of Silk Cradle's archives?

As Jhula carefully went through the pages, a particular page had successfully snagged her attention.

"The Dark Prayer..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've had this in my head for a while now, but this is the moment where Jhula discovers the ritual needed to call upon the One Who Waits. I've tried to make it a nerve-wracking experience, but this is a draft and it will be changed in the final product of the chapter it's in.

Cult of the Lamb: Massive Monster Silent Hill: Konami Jhula and the Dark Prayer: me

#original character #crossover #cult of the lamb #silent hill au #cult of the lamb au #grimoire #things are getting spooky #original caracter

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deadlinecom · 1 year ago

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vulgar-mary-p-ppins · 8 months ago

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“What about me?” The soul asked.

The Reincarnation attendant tilted their head. “What do you mean?”

“Well, those two have always been together. Lovers in every life. And I have been their mother, their brother, their best friend, their religious leader more than once. I’ve lived a thousand fulfilling lives by their side—I’m not complaining—but it’s always them. Why?”

The attendant referred to their book for a moment, pursing their lipless mouth. One of the many wings on the right side of their face shuffled, making a dusty sort of sound. The other limbs moved to accommodate the nervous movement.

“It says here that you are a care taker.”

“What?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain,” the attendant said, leaning forward over the lectern. One thin, six fingered hand came up and worried at their forehead. “Remember, last life, when you were four and he was three and you took the battery out of his hand?”

“Yes.” It was strange how memory worked after you were just a soul. Although you had no passive memories to take out and polish, you had all of your memories at the ready. But someone had to remind you of them. The soul supposed that that was what amnesia was like. It had never had amnesia.

“He was supposed to die. But he didn’t. Because you were there.” The attendant shrugged. “A moment in time that would have changed everything. A minor miracle. That is you. Everyone has a care taker. But it isn’t always another soul.”

“So, I saved his life once—“

“Not once,” the attendant said. “Every time.”

And suddenly, it’s mind was filled with little, inconsequential moments: a decision to take a different path, a hand catching you before you fall, a spider flicked away, a piece of forgotten plastic picked up and thrown away. Little miracles. Little moments.

The soul felt overwhelmed. In this form, it could not cry, but it felt tears on its face anyway. It looked up at the attendant.

“So… without me—?”

“Without you, nothing happens. No one is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Most people’s importance is just small. Mundane.” The attendant shrugged again. “But no less profound or impactful. Being alive is a series of tiny miracles that change everything. We are all surviving because of each other.” A wrinkle appeared on their smooth, featureless face. “Or something like that.” They fidgeted with the pages of the book, suddenly awkward. There was a pregnant pause.

“I won’t remember this next time.” The soul said. It was not a question.

The attendant shook their head. “But when you return you will.”

The soul nodded. “When do I go back?”

“When you are ready. You had doubts, so you were sent here instead of the Waiting Room.”

“Where is here?”

“Information.”

It was bureaucratic and straightforward and the soul laughed under its breath. Confused but accommodating, the attendant smiled indulgently.

“I think I’m ready.”

The attendant nodded.

“They are waiting for you in the next room. Have a nice life. We’ll see you next time.”

Two lovers have reincarnated throughout history, destined to find each other and fall in love all over again. There’s also this third guy that reincarnates alongside them… we don’t really know what he does.

#writers #writers on tumblr #writing prompts #writeblr #writing inspiration

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ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 18 days ago

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By Dan Barry and Alan Feuer

Jan. 5, 2025

In two weeks, Donald J. Trump is to emerge from an arched portal of the United States Capitol to once again take the presidential oath of office. As the Inauguration Day ritual conveying the peaceful transfer of power unfolds, he will stand where the worst of the mayhem of Jan. 6, 2021, took place, largely in his name.

Directly behind Mr. Trump will be the metal-and-glass doors where protesters, inflamed by his lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, stormed the Capitol with clubs, chemical irritants and other weapons. To his left, the spot where roaring rioters and outnumbered police officers fought hand to hand. To his right, where the prostrate body of a dying woman was jostled in the bloody fray.

And before him, a dozen marble steps descending to a lectern adorned with the presidential seal. The same steps where, four years earlier, Trump flags were waved above the frenzied crowd and wielded like spears; where an officer was dragged facedown to be beaten with an American flag on a pole and another was pulled into the scrum to be kicked and stomped.

In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump’s volatile political career seemed over, his incendiary words before the riot rattling the leaders of his own Republican Party. Myriad factors explain his stunning resurrection, but not least of them is how effectively he and his loyalists have laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.

What began as a strained attempt to absolve Mr. Trump of responsibility for Jan. 6 gradually took hold, as his allies in Congress and the media played down the attack and redirected blame to left-wing plants, Democrats and even the government. Violent rioters — prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned — somehow became patriotic martyrs.

This inverted interpretation defied what the country had watched unfold, but it neatly fit the persecution narrative that binds Mr. Trump to many of his faithful. Once he committed to running again for president, he doubled down on flipping the script about the riot and its blowback, including a congressional inquiry and two criminal indictments against him, as part of an orchestrated victimization.

That day was an American calamity. Lawmakers huddled for safety. Vice President Mike Pence eluded a mob shouting that he should be hanged. Several people died during and after the riot, including one protester by gunshot and four police officers by suicide, and more than 140 officers were injured in a protracted melee that nearly upended what should have been the routine certification of the electoral victory of Mr. Trump’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But with his return to office, Mr. Trump now has the platform to further rinse and spin the Capitol attack into what he has called “a day of love.” He has vowed to pardon rioters in the first hour of his new administration, while his congressional supporters are pushing for criminal charges against those who investigated his actions on that chaotic day.

When asked about the reframing of the Capitol riot, and whether Mr. Trump accepts any responsibility for what unfolded on Jan. 6, his spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, instead referred in a statement to the “political losers” who tried to derail his career and asserted that “the mainstream media still refuses to report the truth about what happened that day.” She added, “The American people did not fall for the Left’s fear mongering over January 6th.”

The Jan. 6 tale that Mr. Trump tells is its own kind of replacement theory, one that covers over the marble-hard facts the way a blue carpet will cover those tainted Capitol steps on Inauguration Day.

The Seeds of Suspicion

What happened and why seemed beyond debate.

Hundreds of thousands of tips. Tens of thousands of hours of video footage. Thousands of seized cellphones. The attack on the Capitol was, after all, the largest digital crime scene in history, the total estimated cost of its aftermath exceeding $2.7 billion.

The Justice Department has experienced some setbacks in its criminal prosecutions — including a Supreme Court ruling that it overreached in using a controversial obstruction statute — but its success rate has been overwhelming. More than half of the nearly 1,600 defendants have pleaded guilty, while 200 more have been convicted after trial, resulting in sentences ranging from a few days in jail for misdemeanor trespassing to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy.

The story told by many of the indictments begins with a mixed-message speech delivered before the riot by Mr. Trump in a park near the White House. After falsely claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen, he encouraged people to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol, but reminded them that “we fight like hell.”

Mr. Trump retired to the White House, where he watched the televised violence and ignored advice to tell the mob to leave. Then, after sending two tweets calling for peaceful protest, he posted a video repeating his rigged-election falsehood and saying: “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special.”

A follow-up tweet ended: “Remember this day forever!”

Condemnation came swiftly. As shaken Republican leaders denounced him and Democrats moved to impeach him for “incitement of insurrection,” a seemingly chastened Mr. Trump called the riot “a heinous attack on the United States Capitol.” In those early days, he referred to Jan. 6 as “the calamity at the Capitol” and warned that lawbreakers “will pay.”

The outgoing president called for national unity but declined to attend his successor’s inauguration. The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him of incitement, but its leader, Mitch McConnell, declared him “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day” — a sentiment apparently shared by most Americans, with nearly 60 percent saying in polls that he should never hold office again.

But sand was already being thrown in the eyes of history.

Before the Capitol had even been secured, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, was asserting on Twitter that the events had “all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation.” Hours later, the Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham was telling viewers that “there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” And by morning, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, was claiming on the House floor that some rioters “were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.” (Mr. Gaetz would become President-elect Trump’s first choice for attorney general before being derailed by scandal.)

According to M.I.T. Technology Review, this fabrication was repeated online more than 400,000 times in the 24 hours after the Capitol attack, amplified by a cast of MAGA influencers, Republican officials and members of Mr. Trump’s family.

The former president remained mostly silent in the weeks that followed. But in a late March interview with Washington Post reporters that was not made public until months later, he provided an early hint of how he would frame the Jan. 6 attack.

The day he had previously called calamitous was now largely peaceful. The mob that stormed the Capitol had been “ushered in” by the police. And those who had rallied with him beforehand were a “loving crowd.”

A Deep-State Conspiracy Theory

Through the spring and summer of 2021, Mr. Trump’s Republican allies sought to sow doubt and blame others. It was as if Mr. McConnell, among other leading Republicans, had never publicly declared Mr. Trump responsible. As if the world had not seen what it had seen.

In early May, on the same day House Republicans stripped Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of her leadership role for labeling Mr. Trump a threat to democracy, they used an Oversight Committee hearing to minimize the riot. Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina questioned whether all those rioters wearing Trump gear and shouting pro-Trump chants were truly Trump supporters, while Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia likened much of the trespassing to a “normal tourist visit.”

This benign interpretation of Jan. 6 gave way to a much more startling theory, posed in mid-June by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who before his firing two years later was among the most-watched commentators in cable news — that the riot had been a false-flag operation orchestrated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Mr. Gaetz and another Republican loyalist, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, quickly seconded the deep-state conspiracy theory, while Mr. Gosar entered the article on which it was based — written by Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter who had been fired for speaking at a conference beside white supremacists — into the Congressional Record.

Soon after, Mr. Trump broke his monthslong silence about Jan. 6. At an early July rally in Sarasota, Fla., he invoked the name of Ashli Babbitt, a pro-Trump rioter who had been fatally shot by a Capitol police officer while trying to breach the House floor, where lawmakers and staff members had sought safety. She was fast becoming a martyr to the cause.

“Shot, boom,” Mr. Trump said. “There was no reason for it. Who shot Ashli Babbitt?”

The former president also referred to the jailed rioters. Floating the specter of a justice system prejudiced against conservatives, he questioned why “so many people are still in jail over Jan. 6” when antifa and Black Lives Matter hadn’t paid a price for the violent protests that followed the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

The fog machine of conspiracy was turned up a few notches that fall, when the Fox Nation streaming service released “Patriot Purge,” a three-part series in which Mr. Carlson expanded on his specious contention that the Capitol attack was a government plot to discredit Mr. Trump and persecute conservatives.

The widely denounced claim was deemed so outrageous that two Fox News contributors, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest. In a scathing blog post, they wrote that the program was a hodgepodge of “factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery and damning omissions.”

Mr. Carlson’s documentary, they wrote, “creates an alternative history of January 6, contradicted not just by common sense, not just by the testimony and on-the-record statements of many participants, but by the reporting of the news division of Fox News itself.”

Martyrs and Vigils

Amid the conspiratorial swirl of antifa agitators and deep-state plots, a related narrative was gaining traction: the glorification of those who had attacked the Capitol. Instead of marauders, vandals and aggressors, they were now political prisoners, hostages, martyrs. Patriots.

This movement’s energy radiated from a troubled detention center in Washington where a few dozen men charged with attacking police officers and committing other violent offenses were held. A defiant esprit de corps developed among them in the so-called Patriot Wing, where inmates in prison-issue orange gathered every night to sing the national anthem.

Outside the razor-wire walls, their supporters kept vigil in a spot dubbed the “Freedom Corner.” Led by Ms. Babbitt’s mother, among others, they set out snacks, flew American flags and live-streamed phone conversations with inmates.

Sympathy that might have been reserved for the injured police officers was directed instead to those who had assaulted them. And Mr. Trump — whose Jan. 6 actions were now being investigated by the Justice Department and a bipartisan House select committee — emerged in 2022 as their No. 1 sympathizer.

At a mid-January rally in Florence, Ariz., he described the Jan. 6 defendants as persecuted political prisoners. Later that month, in Conroe, Texas, he promised that if he was re-elected, and if pardons were required, “we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

Mr. Trump’s counteroffensive began taking shape. The House select committee, whose members included Ms. Cheney, became in his words the “unselect committee” and the prevailing narrative of Jan. 6 as an insurrection “a lot of crap.”

One of his most repeated contentions was that the Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had rejected his recommendation to have 10,000 soldiers present on Jan. 6. But subsequent investigations demonstrated that it was his own military advisers, and not Ms. Pelosi, who blocked the idea, concerned with both the optics of armed soldiers at a political protest and the possibility that Mr. Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to place the troops under his direct command.

“There is absolutely no way I was putting U.S. military forces at the Capitol,” the acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, later told investigators. Doing so, he said, could have created “the greatest constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.”

As the select committee began holding hearings in early June 2022, Mr. Trump used speeches and his social media platform, Truth Social, to clap back at the damaging evidence and testimony. One post read: “The so-called ‘Rush on the Capitol’ was not caused by me, it was caused by a Rigged and Stolen Election!”

In a speech in Nashville that month, he dismissed the riot as a “simple protest” that “got out of hand,” again floated the possibility of pardons and furthered the false-flag theory by mentioning Ray Epps, a protester falsely portrayed by Mr. Carlson on Fox News and Republicans in Congress as a government plant who had stage-managed the riot.

His efforts seemed to be working. By mid-2022, an NBC News pollfound that fewer than half of Americans still considered Mr. Trump “solely” or “mainly” responsible for Jan. 6.

For some supporters, though, Mr. Trump was not doing enough. In the late summer, he agreed to meet two advocates for the Jan. 6 defendants at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.: Julie Kelly, a conservative journalist who had written skeptically about the Capitol attack, and Cynthia Hughes, a founder of the Patriot Freedom Project, which supported the inmates’ families. Ms. Hughes was also an aunt of Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a professed Hitler fanboy who had spent time in the Patriot Wing.

They told Mr. Trump that the defendants and their families felt abandoned by him, Ms. Kelly later recalled, and that some of the federal judges in Washington he had appointed were among the worst in their handling of Jan. 6 cases.

These jurists had earned the ire of people like Ms. Kelly by repeatedly rejecting arguments that the defendants could not get fair trials in liberal Washington or had been unduly prosecuted for their pro-Trump politics. The judges also knocked down the contention that nonviolent rioters should not have been charged at all, ruling that everyone in the mob, “no matter how modestly behaved,” contributed to the chaos at the Capitol.

After his meeting with the women, Mr. Trump donated $10,000 to Ms. Hughes’s organization and told a conservative radio host that if he was elected, there would be full pardons and “an apology to many.” Days later, Ms. Hughes was given a speaking role at a Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Ms. Hughes’s Patriot Freedom Project closed out 2022 with a fund-raising holiday party at the Capitol Hill Hilton, in sight of the riot scene. Children received gifts, inmates spoke to the crowd from jail and tearful family members shared their hardships. There was also a surprise video message of encouragement from Mr. Trump, who had recently announced his candidacy.

Then, just before Christmas, the House select committee released its final report, based largely on testimony from those inside Mr. Trump’s orbit. It accused him of repeatedly lying about a stolen election and summoning the angry mob that thwarted a peaceful transition between administrations.

In the report’s foreword, Ms. Cheney recalled how her great-great-grandfather answered Abraham Lincoln’s call to defend the union by joining the 21st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He fought for four years, she wrote, for the same essential principle the committee was empaneled to protect: the peaceful transfer of power.

The Candidate and the Prison Choir

Perhaps the moment when Mr. Trump and his allies fully embraced their alternate version of history came on March 3, 2023, when a new song appeared on major streaming platforms.

The song, “Justice for All,” featured Mr. Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while the men of the Patriot Wing, now billing themselves as the J6 Prison Choir, sang the national anthem. In other words, it was a collaboration between a man seeking the Republican presidential nomination and about 20 men charged with attacking the nerve center of the republic.

Mr. Trump recorded his contribution at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, while the choir was recorded with a phone in the Washington jail. The song — a fund-raising effort that the Trump loyalist Kash Patel, now the president-elect’s nominee to head the F.B.I., helped produce — concludes with a defiant echo of the “U.S.A.!” chants that resounded during the Jan. 6 attack.

The first Trump campaign rally for the 2024 election took place three weeks later, in Waco, Texas, where a deadly standoff between federal agents and a religious cult in 1993 became a far-right touchstone. Before launching into complaints about persecution and promises of retribution, the candidate placed his hand over his heart for the playing of what an announcer called “the No. 1 song” on iTunes and Amazon, featuring Mr. Trump “and the J6 Choir.”

Mr. Trump’s version of the attack on the Capitol had firmly taken hold, at least within his party. A YouGov poll at the time found that most Republicans believed the events of Jan. 6 reflected “legitimate political discourse.”

In August 2023, Mr. Trump was indicted twice on charges of interfering with the 2020 election results: at the state level, for illegally seeking to overturn the results of the election in Georgia, which he had narrowly lost; and at the federal level, for conspiring to impede the Jan. 6 certification of Mr. Biden’s election.

A subsequent court filing by Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the federal investigation, cited Mr. Trump’s steadfast endorsement of the rioters and of the prison choir, “many of whose criminal history and/or crimes on January 6 were so violent that their pretrial release would pose a danger to the public.” The former president, it continued, “has financially supported and celebrated these offenders — many of whom assaulted law enforcement on January 6 — by promoting and playing their recording of the national anthem at political rallies and calling them ‘hostages.’”

All true. Still, Mr. Trump continued to play “Justice for All” at rallies and at Mar-a-Lago, spread his rigged-election lie, drop intimations of false-flag conspiracies, refer to those who stormed the Capitol as patriots — and, now, transformed the indictments into further fuel for his persecution narrative.

In so many ways, Jan. 6 had become part of his brand — a brand in which an attack on the symbol of American democracy became a defense of that same democracy: a blow against political thugs and closet communists, deep-state plots and an unjust justice system.

A part of the brand that, in November, helped Mr. Trump win election as the 47th president of the United States.

Promising Pardons — and Payback

Once he takes office, Mr. Trump will be positioned to finish refashioning Jan. 6 as a modern Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

With the help of Republican loyalists, the Senate acquitted him of incitement at his impeachment trial. The Supreme Court he had helped mold rejected an attempt to keep him off the ballot under a constitutional ban against insurrectionists from holding office. And his legal maneuvering — to delay, delay, delay — succeeded: In the days after the election, Mr. Smith, the special counsel, dropped his election-subversion case, adhering to a Justice Department policy not to prosecute a sitting president.

An emboldened Mr. Trump has already indicated that his presidential agenda will include payback for those who declared him responsible for the Capitol attack. He has said that Mr. Smith “should be thrown out of the country,” and that Ms. Cheney and other leaders of the House select committee — “one of the greatest political scams in history,” his spokeswoman, Ms. Leavitt, said — should “go to jail,” without providing evidence to warrant such extreme measures.

At the same time, Mr. Trump’s repeated vows to pardon those implicated in the Capitol riot, an act of erasure that would validate their claims of political persecution, have electrified the Jan. 6 community of families, defendants and felons. On election night, those keeping vigil outside the Washington jail celebrated with champagne.

Even though Mr. Trump has not specified whom he would pardon, many Jan. 6 participants are anticipating a general amnesty for everyone involved. One defendant, charged with attacking police officers with a baseball bat, even promoted an A.I. video of inmates in orange jumpsuits parading triumphantly out of jailhouse doors.

Many defendants have requested delays in their court proceedings because, they say, the imminent pardons will render their cases moot. Among those employing this argument was Philip Sean Grillo, convicted of several misdemeanors after entering the Capitol through a broken window and later boasting in a recording that “we stormed the Capitol. We shut it down! We did it!”

But to Mr. Grillo’s misfortune, the federal judge handling his case was Royce C. Lamberth, 81, a no-nonsense former prosecutor who had been appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. Judge Lamberth not only rejected Mr. Grillo’s request for a delay, he filed a court document to “clear the air” and “remind ourselves what really happened.”

With clinical precision, the judge recalled how an angry mob invaded and occupied the Capitol with intentions to “thwart the peaceful transfer of power that is the centerpiece of our Constitution and the cornerstone of our republican legacy”; how they ignored directives to turn back and desist; how some engaged in “pitched battle” with the police, “stampeding through and over the officers.”

“They told the world that the election was stolen, a claim for which no evidence has ever emerged,” the judge wrote. “They told the world that they were there to put a stop to the transfer of power, even if that meant ransacking, emptying, and desecrating our country’s most hallowed sites. Most disturbingly, they told the world that particular elected officials who were present at the Capitol that day had to be removed, hurt, or even killed.”

The country came “perilously close” to letting the orderly transfer of power slip away, Judge Lamberth wrote. He knew this, he said, because he and his colleagues had presided over hundreds of trials, read hundreds of guilty pleas, heard from hundreds of law enforcement witnesses — “and viewed thousands of hours of video footage attesting to the bedlam.”

With that, Judge Lamberth ordered Mr. Grillo to be taken immediately into custody to begin a sentence of one year in prison.

As he was being handcuffed, the Jan. 6 rioter taunted the veteran judge by saying it didn’t matter: He would be pardoned anyway — by a man who will soon benefit from the peaceful transfer of power while standing on a blue carpet covering an old crime scene.

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stormxpadme · 3 months ago

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Whumptober 2024 No. 17 - Nowhere else to go

06/10/2018

The wardroom was the only place in Watergate that didn’t give you claustrophobia. At least when all the partition walls had been sunk into the ground and all the training and fun equipment had been pushed back against the plain gray walls. At the first general assembly of the new Brotherhood that Everett ever was part of, it was still far too crowded for his taste. It took him a full ten minutes to push his way through the masses of excitedly chattering mutants to the stairs leading to the slightly elevated area, separated by a thin pane of glass, where the Brotherhood leaders sat down for such occasions. When five thousand powerful warriors gathered in one place, territorial fights, and stallion manners were a given, including body parts being flung around, beverage cans, metal parts being torn out of the floor or walls, or energy discharges. He didn't want Artie in the middle of that.

“I'll be right back.” He briefly nodded at his stepbrother before leaving him at the head of the stairs, from where Artie would be able to see the hall better.

The kid seemed more composed than in their quarters earlier, but it was clear that he didn't feel comfortable in the presence of so many aggressive people.

Everett couldn't blame him. For his taste, many of these mutants thought a little too much like Pyro and Toad. In their bloodthirst, these people had forgotten how to focus on the admittedly few positive aspects of life that being shunned by normal people left mutants with.

Even though Everett did enjoy the satisfaction himself of unleashing his hate at least on those who had offed innocent people like his parents, Artie's foster parents ... You didn't always have to lash out. There were so many other things you could be a part of to make this planet a better place. That was exactly what he wanted Artie to never forget, lest the only person he loved he had left would ever possibly be tempted to get himself right in the line of fire with a rifle in his hand after all. The boy and Everett would be happy to reap the benefits of Mystique's plans as much as any other mutant, and wasn’t completely reluctant about doing what was asked of him in order to achieve that, but his brother and he had never been interested in random massacres. All the more important to do his part to make sure everything went well tonight, so soon, that there would hopefully be no more need for open battle in the first place. With a single strong jump, Everett swung up onto the prepared small stage and waited impatiently for the obligatory cheering from the small groups of mutants of all ages to subside. Cheering, mostly stemming from the fact that these people knew exactly about his position on Mystique's leaderboard and suspected that they would finally find out what was going to happen today. “My comrades.” With a slight bow, Everett came to stand at the small lectern and leaned over the microphone, which promptly let out a protesting whistling sound. Dear God, it was really time for all of them to get away from this dump and back to civilization. ”This evening will start a new era for our species. And all of you will be the protagonists on this page of history. Don't disappoint me; I'm counting on you. But first, join me in welcoming your leaders!” He nodded his chin towards the glass corridor under the ceiling, the passageway that only people of higher rank in Watergate were allowed to use, which ran through all the rooms and offered Mystique and her people an unobstructed view of what was happening in their base.

Today it was their pedestal. With his head held high and a superior smile on his lips, his boss strode down the hallway until she was directly above the stage, her two most important fighters in tow. With a few elegant somersaults, a single fluid movement, her blue-red figure swung down next to Everett through a hatch in the floor. With an amicable hand on his shoulder, she implied a bow towards her followers.

And they all cheered, all these so very different people from all classes, with all their various deformities, different body types, not a hint of uniform military appearance or strict etiquette on their bodies. None of them could be forced into any constraints that only those narrow-minded, short-sighted primitives out there had come up with anyway. But they all had one thing in common: their loyalty, their enthusiasm for the Brotherhood's goals.

Mystique enjoyed her applause ever until Toad's greenish figure swung down beside her onto its long, powerful legs, with a single leap as well, and Pyro, slower but more pompously, made his way down the short distance on a hover platform, followed by the yearning glances of young mutants of every gender and, of course, his own bed bunny. The three leaders were already wearing their battle gear, with their demonstratively adapted appearance making it clear without saying a word that today would be serious. The best time for Everett to retreat in relief. He had fulfilled his today very brief public job and provided Mystique with her curtain call and the necessary attention ... Now his other, much more important task that night awaited him. There were patients to be taken care of and a weapon to be guarded.

*******

Raven audibly cleared her throat into her microphone, growing more impatient with each passing minute to finally get the plans for this evening underway. “As most of you probably already suspect, we recently completed the last tests with the Field. Thanks to some lucky coincidence, we can consider ourselves safe from unwanted interference tonight. For this reason, the leadership of the Brotherhood of Mutants has unanimously decided to put the conquest of our new home in motion. We leave in an hour, ladies and gentlemen.” She gave her subjects a moment to stomach this crucial announcement, already steeling herself mentally against possible objections.

While especially the mutants who'd been here for a while already, who had been through the most shit in their lives, seemed immediately enthusiastic and visibly would have loved to be on their way to the mainland already, already pushing towards the door, unease spread among the groups of the newcomers. “Are we really enough people for such a quest?” Young Theresa was the first to dare to voice her doubts. ”I mean ... we are talking about a city of millions of people.”

“Size doesn't matter ... well, not in this regard it doesn’t.” Pyro stepped forward with a suggestive grin, and this time Mystique let him. Once he had been told clearly enough what to do, the boy was usually damn good at it. And it was the younger, less mature people among their people who liked him best, who could identify with him better than they could with Toad and her, who admittedly had seen a few more decades. Pyro had the laughs on his side with his remark, and most of the doubters as well, when he demonstratively brought the fire around his wrists to life. “We have the voice to reach them all, the control over their weapons to protect us, the destructive power to make it clear to them that a fight would be futile. Arm yourselves, don't hesitate, don't stop for even a moment. Don't talk to them, keep an eye on them, don't attack before they do. If they don't want to leave voluntarily, force them to. And if they strike out ... Eliminate them.” The smile had disappeared; now the orders were being given that all these fighters had been prepared for in their training and that should no longer surprise anyone, and yet a hesitant murmur went through the room when Pyro revealed his own readiness to kill, his anger at the humans, with bared teeth and rings of fire flickering ever more intensely around his hands.

“Many innocents will die tonight,” the voice of this girl of all people, from the former strike forces of their enemies, rose again. ”Does our desire for freedom really justify that, Mystique?”

“Yes, people will die today,” Raven replied harshly, not backing down a single step. ”Including innocent people. Like your father, Theresa. Don't forget why you came to me.”

The short but very powerful reminder of the young woman's loss quickly silenced her, along with a few others who had apparently wanted to make similar arguments. Hatred showed on many faces; far too present in the minds of these people, the humiliation, the injuries, and also the grief still was that many of them had to accept simply because of their genes, to really feel compassion or remorse.

“Don't get me wrong, boss ...” Only Jedda, who rarely accepted Mystique's motives without question, was not yet convinced. Of all people, this uncouth jungle girl, who was one of the most brutal people here in training and who beat up prisoners for her own amusement, suddenly had doubts about something she had been looking forward to just as much as the others. She even stood up for her little rebellion, raising her round chin up high, with her hips on her hips. “But you always said that if we provoke random attacks with many victims, we're no better than them.”

“That's right,” Pyro spoke up again. ”That's why we don't use weapons of mass destruction, like normal people would, although to be honest, some days I do feel like it a lot.” He paused when new approving applause from the eager warriors confirmed this desire for primitive revenge. “But that's not the path we've chosen, none of us here did. We just want to live like everyone else, and as long as they don't get in our way, we don't deny that right to the primitives either. Theresa will make it clear to the people in the city that they must surrender without a fight if they don't want to be harmed. Those who disobey this order will be responsible for their own fate.”

“None of you is forced to go.” It was only now, when the doubting voices had been reduced to a minimum and she could be sure that almost no one would accept this offer, that Raven put it out there. Ideally, she would have needed everyone present at the front, but the Field was safest here; she had decided that a long time ago. And that meant that, whether she liked it or not, she would also need a few people in Watergate. Not that she expected anyone to actually be able to locate the base, today of all days, or that any of her prisoners would pose any danger ... But she had learned to play it safe in the last few years. “Everett needs a few capable warriors to secure the base anyway. Those who would rather move to our new home with a clear conscience tomorrow are welcome to do their damn job here.”

Again, a few individual voices were heard among the crowd, but this time they were approving. Jedda also nodded slowly; the prospect of not having gallons of blood on her hands but being allowed to smash the faces of one or two enemies in if necessary brought a smile back to her face. “Now we're talking.”

“And if anyone still doubts that we are doing the right thing ...” Mystique let the increasingly more violent mood sink in for a few seconds before she delivered the final blow. Now no one was arguing any longer, but she had no interest in any of her soldiers getting cold feet either, just because some brat in the Bronx was crying for mercy in their mother's arms. After all, their dear friends among normal people didn't take such subtleties into account either. She connected the data device she'd brought with her to the computer under the lectern and projected the image of the child's body taken from Alaska, sporting horns and violet skin, onto the screen that almost covered the entire transverse side. She nodded bitterly when some of her followers cried out in shock and horror, sobbing, and others even had to turn away. “That's what normal people think tolerance and pacifism look like. By the way, this attack on a mutant refuge happened only a few months ago. Do you really want to wait until these primitives find a way to destroy us all with viruses of this kind?”

“Of course not.” After her little outburst, Jedda's fighting spirit emerged again. She visibly put herself together and took a few steps forward, traces of tears on her deeply tanned cheeks that she didn’t hide, and looked into the faces of the last people hesitating. ”We've put up with this crap long enough, all of us. We have to fight back before they destroy us.”

“We need a place where we are safe,” Pyro agreed with a satisfied nod. "A home for all the mutants who can't find one in the world of normal people and who aren't even welcome in the swanky mansions of our own species’ sanctuaries because they don't like your face, your powers, or your political views there. That's why you're all here, so that we can take back what is rightfully ours and no longer be defenseless against the hatred of normal people.”

His voice became louder with each word; he came to stand at the edge of the stage, arms raised high, seemingly looking all of Raven's followers in the eye at once, with a determination in his gaze that almost bordered on desperation.

And the people reacted as they always did to his speeches. One by one, the other mutants raised their weapons or their bare hands, letting energy, water and electricity play around their fists, or voiced their final approval with a loud battle cry. The fear, misplaced regret and grief that had been present in far too many places in the hall a moment ago, had given way to the unbridled wrath that the treatment by normal humans had left in all these mutants ... Which would now finally turn against their enemies.

“Tonight is our night!” Pyro shouted, anticipation and ecstasy in his deep, gravelly voice, a glow in his dark eyes that far exceeded the radiance of his fire. It was one of those rare moments when Mystique was proud of him. ”When the sun rises, New York will belong to those who have nowhere else to go. We will no longer hide. We will have our own realm, where no one is an outcast, no one is not accepted. From across the world, they will come to us, and normal people will choke on their envy of what we will make of our little world. Fight for that, my brothers, my sisters. For that, bleed tonight! Tonight is ours!”

His last enthusiastic cry echoed through the hall, accompanied by countless other cheers.

With a satisfied nod and his head bowed in respect, Pyro stepped back, his arms still raised high in the air. “Tonight is ours, Raven,” he repeated, audible only to her, as she nodded in appreciation, already on her way to the hangar, where they would wait for the others to change and arm themselves. This time she let him call her by her real name. There were some things you just couldn't teach this boy. And as long as he continued to perform as well as he just had, that was alright. “I just hope for all our sakes that it will bring what you hope. Because if it doesn't ... Then this was probably our last big speech to the people.”

Mystique preferred to send him to his helicopter with a silent gesture before another fruitless discussion could arise. They'd thrown the dice, there was nothing more to talk about. Now they would see how much she had really achieved in the years since Erik's disappearance.

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